Narrative and Sound in "The Scent of Green Papaya"

Narrative and sound is a marriage that must be formed in order to create any good film. “The Scent of Green Papaya” tightly interweaves narrative and sound in many ways. The sound is not only an accessory to this narrative, but also an essential, integral part to the story itself and is also a second narration. Mui works for a wife, whose husband is constantly absent, and her two boys. In one scene, Mui is bent down; doing chores and the mother fixes her gaze on her for a few seconds. As she watches Mui, she is reminded of her dead daughter To, and the wind instruments that accompany this scene reflect the sadness she feels. Later, Mui is washing vases and the younger boy walks into the room and pees in one of the vases she has just washed. The sounds in this scene, the wind instruments and the thumping sound of the papaya, increase in intensity and pitch as the scene reaches its climax of when the younger boy pees in the vase. When the camera focuses on a picture of the father, the spectator hears the sound of the papaya as it is being thumped and the rhythm matches that of the ticktock of a clock. This semblant ticktocking is a metaphor for the sadness the family feels and the eagerness for him to return home. The wife and son cry at their anger towards him and the music of the wind instruments matches the sadness they feel because the pitch lowers and slows. There is a rhythm to the popping sound as Mui hits the papaya with the knife, trying to break it open, a rhythm which mimics the consistency of the difficulty that Mui is a forbidden fruit to some. As Mui plans her escape, the family is sleeping and the violin sounds that play increase in frequency and intensify in pitch, mimicking the fear that she might get caught. When watching this scene, I was reminded of the shower scene in “Psycho” just as Norman Bates is raising his knife to stab Marion. Ten years later, Mui is a servant to a pianist, who is engaged to a woman he does not love. Instead, Mui finds his affection and his fiancée’s anger at this demonstrates itself during the scene where the fiancée slaps Mui because her pianist fiancé drew a picture of her. As the fiancée’s anger rises, so does the pitch and shriek of the violins. The narrative “The Scent of Green Papaya” would lose its effect on the spectator without the type of music it featured and without the pace at which the instruments were played. At first listen, the sounds appear to be non-diegetic, but as the plot develops, the spectator sees and hears that these sounds become diegetic. Therefore, the cohesion of narrative and sound enhances the sense of connection to the story of "The Scent of Green Papaya".